With mosh pits under control, maybe police can do something about Tool concerts

A Boston Police sergeant and a lawyer for Hurricane O'Reilly's agree on one point: Around 1:45 a.m. on Jan. 19, an unconscious patron was curled up in a fetal position on the sidewalk outside the Canal Street bar.

How he came to be in that position could determine whether the Boston Licensing Board punishes the bar at a meeting tomorrow.

Sgt. Adam Mazzola said he arrived on scene to find the unconscious man. His friends, who carried him outside, told him they had been patrons inside. "He was clearly overserved," Mazzola told the board at a hearing yesterday, adding it seemed obvious to him that somebody in the bar "dropped the ball" and disregarded training on when to cut off a patron.

But attorney William Burke proposed another theory: The guy was actually on drugs, likely taken at a Tool concert at the Garden earlier in the evening and that the bar did not let him drink himself into oblivion. Gerard McHale, head of security for Hurricane O'Reilly, said the man spent about 45 minutes sleeping upright in a chair inside the bar.

Burke asked Mazzola if he was aware that Tool songs are known for their emphasis on drugs. Mazzola said he was unfamiliar with Tool's oeuvre, but that he supposed any band playing the Garden might have songs about drugs.

The incident was the second Hurricane O'Reilly's incident before the licensing board yesterday.

In the first, a man claimed he needed six stitches over his eye for a gash opened up by a large, mean guy who jumped into a fight between his girlfriend and another woman on Nov. 13.

Burke, McHale and a bar manager, however, said the girlfriend instigated things by throwing a glass at the other woman, that although the large guy did in fact get into it with the boyfriend, the boyfriend did not have a cut when he left Hurricane O'Reilly's and that he probably got the laceration in a second fight down the street after being escorted out of the bar.